Circle of Love
by Haleine Delail
Summary: Do you love your planet?  Is the Doctor the ultimate pagan?  A quick, touchy-feely oneshot!


**This came about as a result of one of those weird little writing exercises that I do. My prompt was "That Told the Coven." Naturally, a Doctor Who idea started to form because that's where all of my thoughts run these days.**

**It's a womanly, touchy-feely story that I hope you won't find preachy. My concern is that I'll stereotype the Christians AND the Wiccans, and in the process turn off the Doctor Who fans! But perhaps not - it's all very feel-good, and the bad guys aren't even human. I think that people such as the ladies in my story really had/have the right idea about some things, and it's a good message we all should take to heart. **

**I'm just a great big hippie - so sue me. ;-)**

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><p>Outside Salem, Massachusetts, 1720...<p>

"Like all mothers, our Earth is a being of sacrifice. She gives of her precious body, her precious fluids, so that we, her children, might till and take from the land, drink from the rivers, and live. Much as you say that your Christ has you consume of His body and His blood as an aid in gaining and guaranteeing eternal life in the Kingdom, our Mother is our Saviour, and we gain eternal life through a circle of love. We revere and protect her flesh, while she sustains our lives. We are not so different, you and we. Our Mother, your Christ, the circle of love. And yet, you insist upon appropriating our Earth – no, _forcing_ our Earth to do your Christ's bidding. We are all children of the Earth, children of your God, and we all should have a reciprocating bond, and yet…"

We suffer, just like you. And so we pray, just like you.

This night, we were not praying to our goddess, we were praying to our neighbours, the Christians. Of course, the goddess is instrumental in allowing them to hear us, but our message was for them, though on her behalf. We do not expect them to abandon their deity any more than we would abandon ours. We simply ask for two things: to be left in peace to honour our Mother without fear of dying unnaturally and horribly, and that the Christians participate in _all_ circles of love, as their religion would have them do. This way, we may all enjoy our Mother Earth for millennia to come. If she gives and all we ever do is take, no-one, not even the Christians, can survive for long. After all, she's the only planet we have.

In mid-prayer, in mid-sentence, a storm gathered with a swiftness that we children had never encountered. It stretched into the far reaches of the horizon. The sky became a vast web of purple beams as tendrils of lightning crawled across the great black dome. We believe in the power of prayer and the joy and the wrath of the goddess. We thought that she was displeased with us. Perhaps she wanted us to live quietly with the Christians, not ask them to give any more of themselves?

My sisters and I stood stunned, looking up at the heavens. It was a storm of which we had never seen the like, colours we had never seen the goddess display in the sky. Flashes of pink and yellow and green in between clouds of midnight blue and silver, winds such as to carry us off, an unholy noise blowing through our minds and ears. Lightning struck, then struck again. A tree in our vicinity attracted a bolt, then caught fire and collapsed. We immediately ran to the site of the destroyed tree, and held hands round it.

"Mother, guide us!" I called out. My sisters echoed me. "If we have displeased you, what would you have us do? Send us a sign!"

And then, a strange noise filled our ears. It sounded like two worlds, two dimensions, grinding together. Two realities coming into contact, but not happily.

"O goddess, we implore you, we give ourselves to you!" I called out. It was a cue to disrobe. My sisters and I threw our garments to the ground, offering our unencumbered bodies up to the bidding of our Mother. If we are to be truly her servants, truly givers of our bodies as she, then we must be as naked as she.

Something otherworldly was appearing in the middle of our circle, right beside the burning tree. It was like the ghost of something rectangular. The gods deal in trinities and pentacles, not in fours. I could not make any sense of this entity, even as the great grinding nose came to cease, and the rectangular ghost came to solid.

"By the goddess…" one of my sisters breathed.

The rectangular object was dark blue, and seemed to glow from within. It had windows like a building, but it was clearly too small for anyone to live inside – perhaps it was a messenger from another world, a different kind of god.

And then a door opened on one side. A woman stuck her head out and looked into the sky. She was dark-skinned like the children who are taken from Africa, but she had eyes bright with optimism, rather than the dark defeat we usually witness in them.

"Blimey!" she cried out. "That's one hell of a storm!"

"A messenger from the goddess!" another sister breathed.

I shushed her.

Then the woman in the box looked around the corner. She saw the tree lying on the ground in fits of fire. The flame had grown in height and girth and intensity, as had the storm, but we were too distracted to notice. The burning went way over our heads, and would have lit up the night, were the skies not in a fiery turmoil themselves.

"Bloody hell! Doctor!" she cried out, disappearing back into the box. We heard her yelling inside. "Get a fire extinguisher!"

We heard a man's voice from inside as well, though we couldn't make out his words. He was yelling just as she was.

"Well if this wooden box catches fire, then there will be no vanquishing anything!" she argued.

My sisters and I looked at each other.

We heard the man give a great cry, then burst out the door, still screaming. The woman followed suit. His vocalisations indicated panic, frustration and urgency. They ran round the side of the blue box with strange-looking cylindrical devices in their arms. Both of them seemed to aim some sort of appendage from the cylinder at the fire, and the air, once again, filled with a foreign noise. A great hiss came forth, as did a great amount of billowy, foul-smelling smoke. Though, in a few moments, the fire was out. The little wound on the skin of our Mother was now neutralised, if not healed. We were relieved, though no-one spoke.

"Well, that takes care of that," said the man. "And those. Cleaned 'em out, we did. Remind me to stop at a hardware store for more extinguishers next time we're back in the twentieth century, yeah?"

"Sure," said the woman.

They both came round the box again and threw the red tins inside, making a large clang. The man turned around and looked at us. He seemed to see us for the first time.

He stopped in his tracks, and his face was riddled with surprise. His eyebrows nearly reached his hairline.

"Whoa," he said.

The woman looked at him and waited for him to speak. When he didn't, she rolled her eyes, and sighed. "So, are we a coven of some sort?"

I answered for myself, and my sisters. "We are the Coven of Fallen Embers."

"Oh, sorry," she said. "Did we just, like, extinguish your religious altar or something?"

"No," I said. "We work to _repair_ our Mother Earth, not aid those who seek to blemish it."

She cleared her throat. "Right. Well, no disrespect, but do you think you and your friends could maybe put some clothes on? My friend here is _painfully_ shy."

The man seemed to snap out of his stupor. "Well, not always. Just when… you know, there are twelve naked women standing around me in a circle during a Frahethan Thunder storm."

"Doesn't happen to you a lot, then?" she asked him, while we all picked our robes up off the ground and shrugged them back on, fastening the fronts with sashes.

"Hasn't in quite a while," he said to her, leaning down to whisper.

She shuddered a bit, though I detected a slight smile of amusement in her reaction.

"Well, Coven of Fallen Embers, it's nice to meet you," the man said with a kind of flourish. "I'm the Doctor, and this is Martha Jones."

"Where do you hail from, Doctor and Martha Jones?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, his cheeks filling with air. Then he let the air out with an unnecessary amount of noise. "Far, far from here."

Martha Jones nodded emphatically.

"Why have you come?" I asked.

"You see that?" Martha Jones replied, pointing up at the multi-coloured sky. "That is a storm conjured by the Order of Frahethan Thunder. We've been tracking them for days."

"They finally landed here," the man told us. "They want to… well, flood the Earth with acid, but there's no reason to panic..."

My sisters tittered, but I silenced them.

"Why ever, Doctor?"

"Well, the why is not important," he told me. "The stop-them-and –throw-them-in-an-intergalactic-prison is what's important."

"That means he doesn't know," Martha translated.

"Thanks for that," he muttered to her. Of me, he asked, "Now, what did you say your purpose was again?"

"We seek to give back to our Mother Earth, protect her as she protects us, thus perpetuating the circle of love, and the circle of life."

He smiled like a child. "Aw, good old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool pagans. Love it. Well, then, ladies," he said. "You're gonna love this bit."

He reached inside the blue box and came out holding something strange, though it was not, by far, the strangest thing we had seen that day. It was made of metal and wire, and some kind of red opaque material. Lights dazzled from it, and it made a weird blipping sound. He took it outside our circle and lay it on the ground. Martha stood with her back to the device, then counted twenty paces from it, which put her back in the middle of our circle, near the blue box.

The Doctor reached inside his odd brown garment and pulled forth some kind of metal utensil. He gave it to his companion and said, "Setting eight-nine. Then fourteen."

"I know, Doctor."

"Do not forget, Martha," he warned. "The fate of…"

"I know what's riding on this," she told him firmly. "It's my planet, remember?"

He clammed up, chastised, and nodded. "When I give the signal," he murmured to her.

He knelt beside the device and it made a whirring sound. He nodded at Martha. She held the metal tool aloft and it made a separate type of whirring sound, and it emitted an eerie blue light, like fire as seen from the sea floor.

"Doctor, what is happening?" I asked.

"I'm contacting the Order of Frehethan Thunder," he shouted, making adjustments to the bizarre machine. "I'm giving them a chance to back off before I fry all of their technology and strand them in deep space."

"You're sending a message to other beings such as yourselves?" I wondered.

He looked at me squarely, and blinked twice. "Yes. Yes we are."

The noise from the device changed, and the Doctor gestured for Martha to stop the metal tool's emissions.

"Now what?" she asked him.

"We wait," he said. "It's either yea or nay."

The skies continued to churn violently for a few moments, and then a great crash of blood orange light filled up the sky and hurt our ears with the sound. My sisters and I huddled together in our surprise, alternately covering our ears and reaching out for one another. No fewer than five blasts of lightning struck in the near vicinity, and forest around us started to burn.

"Dear goddess!" I shouted. "Please forgive us!"

"Doctor, what have you done?" shouted a sister.

"We're going to take this as a nay," he shouted. "Martha, plan B!"

She adjusted the tool in her hand, then held it aloft again, and it gave the same sound, and the same light. The Doctor seemed to make more adjustments to the device.

Yellow hoops of smoke seemed to come from the device then, and the Doctor moved around, aiming it in several different directions. The fire encroached upon us, destroying our precious trees and forest. In a hundred years and ten thousand prayers, we would never be able to heal completely the damage that had been done in the last two minutes. My sisters and I cried, huddled and prayed for forgiveness.

The hoops of smoke flew toward the sky, hoop after hoop after hoop. They spread over the dome above, covering the sky with their subtle yellow glow, and gradually, in great strides, the frightening storm began to abate. The lightning left off, and then the great incendiary green and pink swathes across the horizon. The winds died down, the dark clouds came undone, and Martha stopped the tool from buzzing.

And then, the last thing to die was the fire. But a glance around told me and my sisters that our woodlands had gone dark. Black charcoal now lay where our Mother's great evergreens had once stood so majestically, perfectly punctuating our hills.

We all looked about, saddened.

"I'm sorry about your forest," the Doctor said. "But it _will_ heal."

"The Earth cries in bitterness and pain," one of the sisters told him, crying herself.

"Indeed," I said. But one thing was certain. In a hundred years and ten thousand prayers, we would never have been able to stop the inferno that had been conjured and let out of control around us, nor would we have been able to stop the storm of acid that the Frehethan Thunder had tried to rain upon us, if what the Doctor and Martha Jones had said was true.

The Doctor and Martha Jones had saved our Earth.

"Doctor, you are a part of our circle of love," I told him. "You have protected our Mother from death, when she could not protect herself, so that we, her children, might live."

"Yeah, well," he shrugged. "I'm a real big fan of your Mother."

"It's a shame we had to give her such a big scar," Martha sighed, gesturing round at the ruined forest.

"Every mother makes sacrifices," I said. "Everything worth fighting for creates a few battle scars."

The Doctor and Martha smiled.

I looked at them carefully. "Are you gods of a different ilk?" I asked them. "What you have done does not seem possible for mere humans."

He took a deep breath. "It's complicated. But we're not gods."

"Then let us exalt you. From tonight, we shall be the Coven of the Blue Box, in your honour."

"No no no," he protested. "Don't do that. No, don't. Really. We'll just be happy to be part of… what did you call it?"

"The circle of love?"

"Yeah, that," he nodded. "Sign us up for that."

We thanked them collectively, and asked them to stay for a short prayer of penitence, in apology to our Earth, on behalf of those who seek to harm her. They did that, and then joined hands and turned to leave.

Just before closing the door on the blue box, the Doctor said, "By the way, what year is it?"

"The Christians would say that it is seventeen-hundred and twenty."

"Ah," he said. "You should know that in five years, it will become illegal to execute you lot for what you do out here in the woods. Just lay low for a while, and you should all come out of it fine."

"Same goes for you, Doctor," I said, feeling that his warning came from someplace kindred within himself.

"I'll take it under advisement," he told me, favouring me with a small, indulgent smile.

"No, you won't," Martha said as he shut the door.

The sound of two worlds having collided, and now breaking apart, filled the air once again, and the Doctor and Martha Jones disappeared from our lives, in their blue box.


End file.
